Month: March 2014

I would like to make a quite controversial statement and claim that in the same way that the educational institution tends to educate children away from their spontaneous creativity, society as an institution educates us all away from knowing what our basic needs really are.

The capitalist systems survival rests on creating addictions as to ensure a steady monetary gain. It thus has to make consumers believe that we need more than we actually need, because how else would there be economical growth? What I’m saying is that with this capitalist system as the main institution of learning that it actually is, we are taught to stop reflecting upon what our actual basic needs are. We are taught to want more and to believe that we actually need more. Capitalism uses the things that we actually do feel a natural need for such as food, sex, clothes etc. and amplifies this need by exposing us to brainwashing continuous waves of advertisement that more or less unconsciously enter our minds and teaches us to want more.

With the amount of sex that we are exposed to in our daily lives from series, movies, commercials, magazines and so forth, how do we remember how much sex we really need? Acknowledging that sex is a basic human need, are we really meant to be as sexual as we are portrayed by the agencies that are trying to make money out of us? And with the amount of food choices, pictures of different foods everywhere we go, the ever-growing interest in cooking and so forth, how much food do we really need? Also acknowledging of course that food is a basic human need, are we really meant to focus that much of our attention on food for such a huge percentage of the day? And with the contradicting image of the ideal body, how do we ever avoid feeling guilty when we constantly exceed our needs and instead go far below them to a point that we become sick? How do we even remember what we really do need? Again with clothes or even anything that is being sold to us, with the constant flow of advertisement, how do we realize when we have too much?

The ways in which industries sell their products to us might seem subtle but in fact they only seem that way because we have internalized their values as our own values without even questioning them. We have been taught to forget about the own sense of ‘enough’ in order to be a good consumer in this society. Unconsciously we contribute to the survival and growth of the capitalist system believing somehow it is good yet it completely blinding to our needs as individuals and devastating to the majority of the worlds population and also of course to the environment. It creates a mass of non-thinkers, an institution in itself that regulates its subjects according to imagined needs created by the greedy for the sole purpose of making more than enough money. Sure, money has become a basic need to survive in this society but what is really money except the value we put into it? So how do we go back to knowing how much money we really need, without being psychologically attacked by the medias portrayal of an ideal life in wealth? How do we draw the line when we are taught that the line is never to be drawn?

Even if it seems like, as we become more and more secular and scientifically oriented, we are more likely to think for ourselves many of us fall into the trap and become part of a new mass even if this one is more selfish than many religious masses. We replace one institution by another and let ourselves be fed and convinced again and again. So how do we do?

We start questioning. We start unlearning. We start stripping ourselves from what we have taken on that does not initially belong to us. We listen to within instead of without. We learn to know ourselves first; before we get convinced that what the moneymakers want us to do is also what we want to do. There needs to be a silencing of the constant feed from outside so that the individual voices can start being heard even by the ones the voices come from. We need to find a sanctuary for us and only us where we don’t allow the feed to be internalized and fool us all.

If there is attachment there will always at some point be a detachment and this causes us pain. Its almost like removing a band aid that’s been glued so hard to your skin for so long that the very thought of it being ripped off hurts all the way from within. We know this to be true and yet we continue to bring people into our hearts and minds and make them a part of us. Why do we do this when we know it can devastate us and tear us apart? It’s almost like a willing sacrifice. We choose to willingly open our hearts for total shattering because of the joy and the love that gets to be given and received while everything is still the way we hoped it to be. Every single day we take the risk to care about people, to let them in and to make them a part of our self even though we know that they might one day break our heart and disappear from their physical form. That’s how beautifully our hearts function, the heart does not fear it’s own death because the heart lives while it can. It is open to anyone at anytime no matter the risk and the possible consequences of wreckage. The heart teaches us to love no matter what. The heart teaches us that the exchange of love is greater than the devastation when the exchange might suddenly end. Love is not wasted just because it is not manifested the same way forever and ever between two physical bodies. Love begins but never ends. A heart that has loved and been loved will always survive it’s own death because it once learned to be open, even if this meant breaking at some point. We love and we die. We rejoice and we cry. It causes us to feel pain but the love we have shared will always encompass all of the pain we suffer. The heart teaches us to be thankful, thankful for the love because it brings us joy and thankful for the pain because it teaches us the hardest yet most important lessons in life: to love and let go.

I have never really taken a stand on feminist questions. Many would say I have been a very bad feminist and I must agree. I, as many others, have been ignorant for a long time. I always saw feminism as a radical group of females that hate men but I have learned that I’ve only been able to see a very little part of the truth, either because that is what was easiest or maybe also because my society made sure that I stayed partially blind to what feminism really means. Because the word ‘feminism’ is directly related to the word femininity many tend to disregard the question of feminism as an exclusively women’s issue yet that is a fatal misunderstanding of the concept. From what I have now learned feminism stands not only for the right of women but for all of humanity, both the minorities and the majorities. Feminism draws upon the simple yet crucial idea that we are all equal and deserve equal treatment and equal rights. Some of us live in the illusion that equality amongst all is already a fact; just because it seems like such an established value we think it subsists in most places but that is still not how the world looks today. There is still a great lack of acknowledgement of the suffering of so many, no matter gender, age, race and so forth, and if it is not of our direct concern it should moreover be. If we paid a little more attention to the world around us we would see that it is not as just as some of us grow up to believe it is. We would also notice that actions that our society makes us believe does good might not always be sufficient to really do something about the ever so present inequalities of today. Women (and of course many other) of the world have suffered from ignorance for very long and it is time that this ignorance is destroyed once and for all. According to Hindu belief; there is no pure evil but only ignorance and therefore it is our responsibility to wake up from this ignorance and educate our self to create the equal world that we speak so highly of but see so little of. I think there is much to be learnt and much more to be done…

I strongly believe that we as humans have the means to denounce the structure that we our selves and our ancestors have set up. We can stop complying with the structural violence that is imposed upon us through the constant feed of a constructed and corrupted value system, which only serves to limit the individual’s freedom.

Some may claim that even if you try to change a system or if you try to escape from it you are actually still contributing to it in some way. I beg to differ. Today in class we discussed whether joining the “do-what-you-love”-movement is just another way of conforming to the ruling institutions or not. Scarily enough, the majority we’re inclined to propose that there was in fact no way of fully escaping from being a result of the system and I decided that there must be a way, even in academic terms, to disprove their arguments.

I think it is more about how we choose to do things rather than what we do that will be the key in ceasing to co-create immoral value systems where we allow some to be the benefiters of it and a majority to be excluded from it. I am not trying to make a political statement, in fact I am deliberately stepping away from any political standpoint because I believe the political system is just such a system that exploits without actually seeing the people that it is supposed to serve, no matter what party or ideology it promotes.

Sure, if doing what you love means either becoming a size 0 model serving to help the media feed distorted pictures of bodies, then, of course you are inevitably (blindly or not) complying with a predefined corrupted social structure. And even if doing what you love means painting flowers on a canvass day in and day out without earning a sufficient income to live “comfortably” and thus doing this ultimately makes you miserable you are still upholding a set of values that were predetermined about what this supposed comfortable life should be like.

But suppose that doing what you love means doing what you love, the way you want to do it and actually loving it… Suppose the structure isn’t all there is, that beyond the structure there is a limitless immensity where, once you set foot there, all of your actions have the potential to be based on your consciously made decisions for the common good. Suppose that this never-ending field derives from your intuition and that your actions have the possibility to not be filtrated by the pollution of your influenced mind.

Beyond the socially created system that serves to sustain itself through power and authority there is a greater ecological system that thrives on unexpected deviations and transformations. Sure, we are creations of our circumstances and the world we’ve been born into but I believe there is a deeper level from where we spring and once we get back in touch with it, become aware and stop being blind to how we are constantly being influenced by authority we can make the social world we live in a means to achieve greater goals beyond the expectations of the structure.